Rex Smith: What we do when truth brings hurt

The Hippocratic Oath, with its exhortation "primum non nocere" — first, do no harm — belongs to physicians, not to journalists. We know that our work sometimes hurts.

That's not because reputable journalists set out to harm somebody, nor because we're the sort of careless scandal-grubbers that screenwriters often create as unsympathetic characters in movies or on TV.

No, what can sting people, even if journalism is practiced with ethical intent and great skill, is the truth. A good journalist finds what's true and then presents it at the appropriate scale. That requires us to be conduits for the truth, even if that truth inflicts pain.

The Times Union has published some painful truth recently, as we often do. We hear the loud voices nowadays that eagerly attribute hostile motives to our work, feeding the cynicism that has grown in America about every major institution. So it's important for people to understand how much care goes into newsroom decision-making when we find ourselves obligated to publish something that we know can injure.

Consider, for example, our coverage of claims raised by people who say they were victims of sex abuse by Catholic priests. News organizations worldwide have been covering the issue for years, ever since the scale of the tragedy was first revealed by The Boston Globe in 2002. We have reported on dozens of alleged perpetrators in our community, including some who have been removed from the priesthood and incarcerated. Many of the alleged perpetrators died long before the claims about their offenses became public.

Those stories are important if we as a society hope to address the scourge of child sex abuse and give justice and peace of mind to the victims. But they may offend people who are loyal to the church or who loved those accused of wrongdoing.

In particular, when a lawsuit was filed last month naming Bishop Emeritus Howard Hubbard as an offender, we heard from people who have long considered him to be the model of a faithful Christian leader. I count myself in their number, so I cringed, too, at the honest coverage of the accusation — which, of course, the bishop fully denies.

To not publish that story prominently, however, would have required abrogating our first ethical charge, which is to seek the truth and report it as fully as possible. The charge against Hubbard had to be fully reported, yet to trumpet it sensationally, downplaying the bishop's response, would have been unfair.

That wasn't such a tough call for an editor: It arose from a claim filed in a court that enforces the law on our behalf, which makes the matter a public concern. But what about painful issues that wouldn't be known if we didn't shine a light on them?

When a payroll servicing firm based in Clifton Park collapsed this week, thousands of people around the country lost funds they had deposited from their paychecks into bank accounts. A surprising outgrowth of that was reported by Times Union Senior Writer Steve Barnes: The entire staff of a popular Troy restaurant quit, saying the owner's indifference to their plight of vanished wages was the last straw in a long string of offensive acts — which they laid out in detail to explain why they abandoned their jobs. When the owner surfaced, he fired back with not only a defense of his management style, but also an attack on his former staff, including an explosive fact about his head chef: He is listed in a state database, the owner said, as a Level 3 sex offender, convicted of abusing three children.

Barnes is a meticulous reporter, so it's not surprising that he reviewed testimony transcripts and other legal documents before reporting the owner's defense to readers. Those documents, he wrote, "paint a more nuanced picture." Readers thus got to know about issues beyond the chef's guilty plea, rounding out their view of the matter.

Even so, Barnes quoted a victim of that abuse, defending the chef and complaining that it shouldn't have been reported at all. "All this article will do is make his life a living hell for another amount of time," he said, "and I don't think that is fair to anyone involved."

In fact, fairness dictated the story's depth, and Barnes successfully met the ethical requirement to minimize harm even as he reported the truth fully. A statute defines guilt or innocence in black and white; the law, we're often told, is a blunt instrument. Good journalism, by contrast, embraces gray areas.

In responsible hands, then, journalism can be more scalpel than hammer — injuring sometimes, yes, as even a surgeon's hand will, but only in pursuit of what at last is surely the healing touch of truth.